Felix Ajiola

Dr. Felix Oludare Ajiola, is a Lecturer in the Department of History and Strategic Studies at the University of Lagos, Nigeria.  His scholarship sits at the crossroads of African social history, economic history, cultural history, and development history. His research transcends boundaries and seamlessly moves between multiple fields in humanities and social sciences.

Currently, Dr. Ajiola’s interest lies in the contradictions, complexities and compelling ways that locality and globalism, traditions and modernity, are reified in African social and economic development, focusing on the impact of European imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism, capitalism and globalisation on the African people and environment. His ongoing research on Slavery and the Ebi system seeks to examine how historical processes—namely the trans-Atlantic slave trade and subsequent colonialism—disrupted indigenous Yoruba kinship systems (Ebi). It will highlight how colonial interventions and the slave trade not only transformed economic and social structures in Lagos but also marginalized the roles of women within these systems.

It will seek to understand how, despite these disruptions, remnants of traditional communal solidarity (embodied in the Ebi system) continue to influence social cohesion and identity in contemporary Yoruba society. He is a member founding and active member of the Lagos Studies Association (LSA).